A Living Death
This is part two of a three-part series about the loss of my twins in July 2014. You can read the details about my loss HERE. This three-part series is just my personal reflections on the events and the anniversary of my loss.
If you missed part one, click here to read.
There was a time in my life when I thought I’d never have children. The infertility treatments weren’t working and we were running out of money. I had to start preparing my heart for empty arms. So finding out I was pregnant, with twins, was a dream come true. Cliche, I know, but it was. Stupidly, I assumed that pregnant meant I would bring home babies. It was a beautiful ignorance because I never worried while I was pregnant with the twins. I literally enjoyed every single moment. Once I said that I if I knew that I was going to lose the babies, I would still have wanted them. I still would have wanted to be their mother. That positive pregnancy test made me a mother. Finally.
Their loss didn’t change my status in the world. I was still a mother, but I was the saddest version of a mother, a mother with empty arms. Furthermore, my body didn’t know my babies weren’t there. Cruelly, my body went through the same things all postpartum bodies go through. My husband and I both cried when my milk came in. Stupid body was trying to feed babies. The same stupid body that betrayed them, causing their loss. So there I was, a mother with no babies. And it felt like a heavy weight on my shoulders. It felt like I had a sign around my neck declaring my terrible position in life. We had to tell friends and family that we were no longer pregnant. We had to come home to a house with a half set-up nursery and incomplete baby projects.
We had to pick up their birth certificates, they each got one because they were alive for a short time. The watermark on their birth certificates said DECEASED in the biggest font the state could possibly squeeze on to the paper. We had to go to a funeral home and pick up their ashes and pick out an urn. At one point, I had to add them to my insurance so they would pay some of their medical bills; bills that somehow occurred during their 60 minutes of life.
Cruelly, I still had to live. I still had to eat, sleep, pee. I had to eventually go back to work, although I regret going back as soon as I did, doing so because I thought it would help me get back to “normal.” As the days rolled on, without my children and with constant reminders of what should’ve been, I started to sink deeper into my grief. I started counseling but that didn’t save my mind from wandering to death.
“I might as well be dead,” I would think. “I want to be dead.”
Living my mundane life seemed completely unfair when they were no longer living theirs, when they should’ve been still growing and kicking me from my womb. Living no longer made any sense. I was now fighting myself. I was now fighting the complete agony of losing my children. The children I wanted more than anything. The children I had fought for some many years. This was the hardest thing I had ever done… living when they could not.
Check back in two days for the last part of this series.
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